Just say 'Whoa!' West faces horse crisis

Tuesday

Aug 27, 2013 at 12:01 AMAug 27, 2013 at 11:35 AM

The West is on the verge of a serious horse crisis. That's the upshot of a new paper in the journal Science, which argues that the wild horse population is growing so fast that the government soon could be unable to manage the herds.

The West is on the verge of a serious horse crisis. That’s the upshot of a new paper in the journal Science, which argues that the wild horse population is growing so fast that the government soon could be unable to manage the herds.

Here’s the back story: About 33,000 wild horses roam freely on public lands in the western United States, descendants of horses brought by Spanish conquistadors. Under a 1971 law, the Bureau of Land Management is supposed to protect these horses and make sure their numbers don’t get out of hand — so that they’re not destroying the ecosystem or dying of starvation.

But the bureau has long struggled to bring the horse population down to the mandated level of 23,622. There are, after all, only a few thousand people willing to adopt horses each year. And Congress has largely restricted the slaughter of healthy horses.

So, in recent years, the bureau has been rounding up excess horses and shipping them to long-term “retirement” facilities — mainly private ranches in Kansas and Oklahoma. The problem is that this is hugely expensive: There are 45,000 horses in these facilities, and the bureau’s horse budget has soared from $19.8 million in 2000 to $74.9 million in 2012.

Lately, Congress has started reining in spending on the effort. The bureau has announced that it will remove fewer horses from public lands. At the same time, wild horses keep breeding, with unmanaged herds able to triple in size in just six to eight years.

Put it all together, and it’s a looming disaster.

The Science paper, written by Robert A. Garrott of the University of Montana and Madan K. Oli of the University of Florida, calculates that if current trends continue, the bureau would have to spend about $1.1 billion over the next 17 years just to keep storing horses in long-term facilities — a level far beyond anything Congress seems willing to contemplate.

“Some horse advocates have argued that we should just let the horses self-regulate on public lands,” Garrott said. “But what do we do when animals are destroying range land, competing with livestock and other wildlife and dying due to starvation and drought?”

In their paper, Garrott and Oli argue that it’s long past time to get America’s horse issues under control. They say that if Congress and the bureau can figure out how to get the number of wild horses down to around 23,000 or so —and soon — then contraceptive vaccines plus adoptions could likely keep the population at a sustainable level.